After the San Diego Symphony’s opening weekend piano concerto marathon with Lang Lang—he played Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto last Friday and Sunday and Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto on Satruday—it seemed like too much of a good thing to invite Garrick Ohlsson to solo in Tchaikovsky’s Second Piano Concerto in G Major the following weekend. But, as Mae West once pronounced with near Papal authority: too much of a good thing can be wonderful! On Friday (October 12) at Copley Symphony Hall, both Ohlsson and the rarely played Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto In G Major were indeed wonderful. Ohlsson, a bear of a…

Kate Hatmaker and Demarre McGill, the lively spirits who design the chamber music series Art of Élan, have the corner on high concept program design. Their new season “in your dreams” opened Tuesday (October 9) at the San Diego Museum of Art with a program titled “transfiguration.” (And, yes, they favor the T. S. Eliot lowercase affectation.) But “transfiguration” is clearly on the high end of high concept notions, and its classical musical repertory is not extensive. There are essentially three choices: Richard Strauss’ massive orchestral tone poem “Death and Transfiguration”; Olivier Messaien’s large choral work “The Transfiguration of Our…